e-Reading event: Web HTML5 or Native App

The market for tablets sees accelerated fragmentation by the growing popularity of Android, the introduction of Blackberry's Playbook and the upcoming launch of Windows 8 in late October. Consequently, publishers of newspapers or magazines can no longer focus only on iPad and iOS, but are forced by their readers to offer reading apps on these other platforms.

The development of separate native front-end apps per OS is very expensive and is associated with high ongoing support and distribution costs.

Cross-platform publishing technology allows to develop once and deploy across various platforms (various OS, screen size and resolutions, different user interface interactions).

During this presentation we focus on the following themes:
- Pros and cons of native vs. web development
- The challenges of cross-platform HTML5 publishing
- Hybrid applications: 'best of both worlds?
- Case study: the digital edition of De Standaard on iPad and Android tablets

19.
Key learnings • Hybrid app development is a cost-­‐eﬀective strategy for cross-­‐platform publishing • Combination of a variety of competences and skills is required (HTML5 / Javascript, Objective C, Android, C#,…) • “100% pure” cross-­‐platform HTML5/JS is a dream • Performance tuning is hard in native apps; it is extremely though in web apps • Testing is a nightmare: due to the device and OS diversity, it impossible to test every use case scenario on every device